OpenStack is ready for business

Banks, Beamers and Dreamers in "show-and-tell"

4 November 2014
by Peter Judge - DCD

OpenStack's Mark Collier makes a point. Photo Peter Judge

Monday’s keynotes stressed OpenStack’s move from research to production, with commercial users including Spanish bank BBVA, German motor maker BMW, and Time Warner Cable introduced by OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce. The three private cloud users covered most of the major commercial OpenStack players, including Rackspace, Red Hat and Canonical.

Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) has deployed OpenStack in a cloud in Spain and is also planning to roll it into Mexico. Its cloud is in fact hybrid, linked to public cloud providers and uses an overlay to add external SDN services. All of this would have been almost impossible with traditional infrastructure, said BBVA’s Jose Maria San Jose Juarez.

BMW had a bit more show-and-tell, bringing on a BMW i8 electric supercar, to liven up a talk about maintaining consistency between BMW’s data centers - a project to be carried out by moving gradually to OpenStack. So far BMW has only 16TB and 100 cores of OpenStack but BMW’s Dr Stefan Lenz expects that to grow rapidly: “This car [the i8] is innovative, elegant, efficient and a joy to the driver, which are all of the things we at BMW want to be,” said Dr Lenz. “Just like OpenStack!”

Time Warner Cable also uses OpenStack internally, with a self-service platform for developers allowing services to be created and delivered quickly. Monday’s keynote also included a ringing endorsement from Jim Zemlin, head of the Linux Foundation, who underlined the need fo open source to create all that is needed: “There’s too much software to be written for any one company to write it.”